Colleen Hendrickson and her grandson Ezra Reed, 3, who lives down the street, place flowers at a makeshift memorial to Shanann, Bella and Celeste Watts, who have been missing since Monday, outside the family home on Aug. 16, 2018 in Frederick. Frederick police have arrested Shanann's husband Christopher Watts on suspicion of murdering the three.

Courtesy The Denver Channel

Christopher Watts with his wife, Shanann Watts, and their daughters Celeste (left) and Bella.

RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post

Christopher Watts is in court for his arraignment hearing at the Weld County Courthouse on Aug. 21, 2018 in Greeley. Watts faces nine charges, including several counts of first-degree murder of his wife and his two young daughters.

RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post

Frank Rzucek the father of Shanann Watts, left, and her brother Frankie Rzucek were in court for Christopher Watts arraignment hearing at the Weld County Courthouse on Aug. 21, 2018 in Greeley. Christopher Watts faces nine charges, including several counts of first-degree murder of his wife Shanann and his two young daughters, 4-year-old Bella, and 3-year-old Celeste.

RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post

Nancy Lee takes a moment after placing flowers at a makeshift memorial for Shanann, Bella and Celeste Watts, outside the family's home on Aug. 17, 2018 in Frederick. Frederick police have arrested Shanann's husband, Christopher Watts, on suspicion of killing the three.

Lewis Geyer, Longmont Times-Call

Weld County District Attorney Michael Rourke speaks during a news conference announcing the charges against Christopher Watts in the death of his pregnant wife and daughter.

RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post

Aubriella Luna, 8, joined others from her community for a candlelight vigil to honor Shanann, Bella and Celeste Watts outside the family's home Aug. 17, 2018, in Frederick.

Joshua Polson, The Greeley Tribune via AP

Christopher Watts looks down during his bond hearing at the Weld County Courthouse Thursday, Aug. 16, 2018, in Greeley, Colo.

There are approximately 15,000 homicides in the United States each year. For the past week or so, only one of them has commanded the national news media’s attention.

The slaying of Shanann Watts, a pregnant Frederick woman, and her two young daughters has attracted airtime on ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News and NBC News. The Washington Post, the New York Times and other newspapers have written stories about the grisly case; USA Today ran a live stream of a court appearance by the suspect, Watts’ husband, Christopher Watts.

The intense interest raises a question: What makes this crime different from the many terrible crimes that don’t rate even a mention on the local news, much less the national kind?

The Colorado story has some singularly lurid and media-centric elements — multiple deaths within a family, copious video footage of the victims and the suspect — but as with much of the coverage of crime in America, the story may reflect race, gender and class dynamics as much as any other detail.

The news media’s focus on the Watts slayings reinforces the conclusion of multiple studies of crime coverage not just in the United States but in other Western nations: that young, white middle- and upper-middle class female victims tend to attract disproportionate media attention compared with people from other backgrounds.

The most well-known and intensely covered “true crime” stories of the past 20 or so years have featured someone similar to Shanann Watts, who was 34 at the time of her death. Whether as victims or alleged perpetrators, each high-profile case has featured a white woman of a certain age — typically teens to late 30s — from reasonably privileged circumstances.

Stories about young, white female victims are “a natural trope” in American society, a variation of the classic “damsel in distress” tale that has been reinforced by movies, books and culture for centuries, said Zach Sommers, a sociologist at Northwestern University who specializes in criminal law.

Thus, viewers and readers relate to young white girls and women as “universal beings” in need of protection, he said. “The audience is more able to think, ‘That could be my daughter, my sister, my neighbor.’ There’s a built-in emotional attachment.”

That makes Shanann Watts — a young mother of two who was pregnant with her third child — the “ideal” victim for news media portrayals, said Michelle Jeanis, a criminologist at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the co-author of a 2016 study on missing-persons coverage. “When a victim is seen as more innocent, it invokes more fear in the public,” she said.

In a 2013 study of missing persons, Sommers compared national and local media coverage of missing people against the FBI’s missing-persons database; he found that African-Americans received disproportionately less coverage than whites. Men also received disproportionately less coverage than women.

Network TV representatives declined to comment directly on their coverage decisions, describing them as internal matters. But privately, several made the same point, in effect justifying the coverage: The Watts story has attracted widespread interest among viewers.

“The viewer response has been overwhelming,” said one. “It’s not a typical run-of-the-mill crime story. It has a number of compelling elements for TV,” including a TV interview with Christopher Watts pleading for the safe return of his wife and daughters.

Warning: The following video may contain content that disturbs viewers.

One network official compared the Watts story to that of Jeffrey MacDonald, the doctor and former Army officer who was convicted of killing his pregnant wife and two daughters in 1970 in a notorious case that became the basis for the book and movie “Fatal Vision.”

The Watts case, in fact, seemed to bump news coverage of the summer’s other “damsel in distress” story, the disappearance of Iowa college student Mollie Tibbetts, 20. Her remains were found Tuesday, just more than a month after she was reported missing.

It would be easy to conclude that the news media are racially and economically biased in selecting which crimes to cover and which victims to portray, but the audience plays an important role, too, said Jeanis. The news media may create a skewed portrayal of victimhood, she said, but the audience rewards it and perpetuates it by responding to such portrayals time and again. “It’s hard to determine which is chicken and which is egg,” she said. “If there’s racial bias, who’s responsible for that?”

Similarly, the media’s focus on relatively prosperous victims may, in part, reflect something more than just a preference for the economically advantaged. People with a high degree of “social capital” — that is, family and social connections — are better able to spread the word to the news media and others about a crime than those who are economically disadvantaged and isolated, she said.

She contrasts the attention the Tibbetts case received this summer with that of Sebastian Husted, a 19-year-old Iowan missing since January. Tibbetts’ friends and family quickly distributed news of her disappearance this summer, drawing attention from local newspapers and TV stations, and eventually from national media outlets. Husted’s family, however, has lamented that it lacked the resources and community support to drum up similar attention for Husted.

In any case, the media attention on Christopher Watts is unlikely to subside even with his admission this week that he killed his wife. Watts will probably stand trial in the deaths of his daughters, which he has blamed on his wife. “My unscientific, educated guess is that if and when this goes to trial, there will be plenty of news coverage,” said Northwestern’s Sommer. “It will be very high profile.”

Injection sites about safety, providing a path to recover Re: “Safe injection site bill shelved,” Feb. 20 news story Understandably, a person’s first reaction to providing safe injection sites for drug users might seem ludicrous. But, upon educating oneself and learning more about the research and purpose behind the sites, safety for all is the No. 1 premise. Republican minority...

The Catholic dioceses of Colorado should have reported to authorities any and all accusations of sexual abuse decades ago, but we must praise the development that finally came Tuesday when church officials announced they will open their records for scrutiny.